I haven’t touched this site more or less since it’s creation, outside of updating the “work” section to include my new role in the SOC. In the time away, I’ve built out my homelab quite a bit and recently also started a new coding project.
The Physical HomeLab
Quite easily the biggest timesink in the past few months. The lab consists of the following:
- HP G4 Z4 for Proxmox
- 128Gb DDR4
- Xeon W-2123, 4 cores 8 threads
- AMD RX580
- 10Gb SFP+ card
- Dell T420 running TrueNAS
- 126Gb DDR3
- E5-2470 v2
- 10Gb SFP+ card
- Storage
- Pool 1
- 3x refurbed 4TB HDD
- Pool 2
- 2x 2TB Samsung SATA SSDs
- Pool 1
- raspberry pi for octoprint (oh yeah I got a used 3d printer too…)
- another rasp pi running rasp pi os
- mac mini (dont remember the year, has a 4th gen i5) also running proxmox
- Cyberpower UPS
- Unifi networking stack
As you can see it’s quickly gotten out of hand.
The software of the HomeLab
Since we’ve covered the hardware, might as well cover what’s running:
Proxmox
- Ubuntu Server as a Docker host
- nginx reverse proxy
- homepage
- grafana
- graphite
- open-webui:ollama
- homarr
- Portainer
- Wazuh Prebuilt VM
- Puffer Panel
- Kali Linux VM
- Windows VM
- Ubuntu Desktop
- Proxmox Datacenter alpha
TrueNAS
- General storage
- Time machine backups
- VM storage
Octoprint
- web based 3d printing management and control
What’s next for the HomeLab?
Besides continuing to tinker and learn, my current plans is to build out a more repeatable infrastructure. What I mean by this is I want to create more of my homelab via infrastructure as code (IaC). This would allow for easier recovery and a better method of starting fresh on new machines without needing to start over.
To achieve this, I plan to:
- Implement AWX for Ansible automation
- Use Terraform for VM management
- Automate the building and teardown of labs
By automating these tasks and making it all repeatable I can spend more time learning and building, at least in theory.
Some of the services I still want to get up and running is my own git host, calibre, and a virtual k8s cluster.
Studying for Certifications
Up next for certs is the Azure Fundamentals since I’ll already be learning some of the basics with the new project at work. After that we’re going to stick with the large organization theme and pivot to Kubernetes.
The CKA (Certified Kubernetes Administrator) and CKS (Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist) are the two main certs I plan to tackle this year. We use Kubernetes at work and while I’m not a sys admin or part of the SRE team, due to kubernetes being a big player within the organization, I want to better understand how it works.
Back to coding
One of the other projects is a new coding project. It’s related to homelabbing and has already been done in many forms but I haven’t seen a “mobile first” style app for the homelab.
Currently building out more of an MVP, but I plan to opensource the project once I have a beta out. While I would guess that most hardcore opensource and homelab enthusiast most likely use anything but an iphone, I think bringing more apps and tools to the apple ecosystem could provide some interesting solutions (and challenges) to the world of homelab.
While this is a more recent project it’s still adding to the never ending to do list!
Am I actually going to blog regularly?
I’d like to think so. With doing more with homelab and working towards creating my own first opensource project, I would like to be more open on my journey moving through the space.
Once I have more of my own organization of things done, I hope to blog at least monthly. It’ll mainly be dev updates on HomeLab Go most likely, but probably will also involve whatever other things I feel like. We’ll just have to wait and see!